The difference being a blog is simply a website and the funds went directly from donors to ActBlue to the fund. The web site simply provided a link as to where the funds should go. It’s a really silly complaint and I’m surprised IRP went after them and not others such as AM or me.

It’s pretty simple how this is covered. If the blog owner were taking money and then sending it on directly, the owner would have to register as a committee. If the blog owner was paid by a campaign, that would have be disclosed. Simply posting a suggestion and link to donate money isn’t operating a political committee. Offline this would be like someone who calls around to friends to encourage them to donate to a campaign having to register as a committee.

According to the People story’s teaser, Winokur “learned the cause of her cervical cancer and now makes sure other women know how to prevent it.”

The sole cause of cervical cancer is human papillomavirus, or HPV, a sexually transmitted disease.

So Winokur contracted cervical cancer due to sexual promiscuity, or to put it as ambiguously as possible, said Winokur, “I learned about a year ago that HPV, a common virus, causes cervical cancer.”

The “prevention,” according to Winokur? No, not a chaste lifestyle. “There’s a vaccine, which can be given to women before they’re sexually active,” she said. “I’ll encourage my friends’ teenage daughters to get vaccinated.”

Aside from the fact Winokur has no business telling other people’s children about “precautions” to avoid pitfalls of promiscuous sex, her advice stinks. Let’s not address the real cause. Let’s try to avoid the ramifications of the cause.

Winokur or People magazine are fueling the exploitation and health demise of women by refusing to acknowledge the only full-proof way to avoid HPV or cervical cancer: abstinence.

There is only one good reason a virtuous young woman should consider getting the HPV vaccination. That is if the man she plans to marry has had sex with other women, meaning he could be infected with HPV or an array of other STDs. I don’t know why a virtuous young woman would want to marry such a man, but there you go.

IOW, punish women who have sex or marry a man who has had sex with increased likelihood of cancer.

Those who used to spend some time on Talk.origins will never forget the duo of Andy and Roger Schlafly and some of the most bizarre claims to surface even in a newsgroup designed to attract the bizarred and weird from useful groups.

A fine start includes that under biological terms -e-, there is no term evolution currently listed. What is going to be fun is to watch the fight over how to define such words because old earth creationists, young earth creationists, and intelligent design advocates are all going to have to debate which is correct using….arguments against evolution.

Similarly, those who swoon at the sight of Senator Beefcake can find in his ponderous, ambiguous statements about serious issues whatever they want to hear. The shame that was Katrina isn’t about race, except that it is. He is a devout Christian who is proud of his brother’s conversion to Islam. He is black, except when he’s thinking of himself as a “half breed.”

Liberals have a well-known propensity for adopting mascots and purporting to speak for them. If they literally can’t speak for themselves (inanimate objects like trees, animals), all the better. Now they have applied this standard to the man that I call He Who Walks on Water and what at least one commentator has called an empty suit who is no doubt delighted to watch his political fortunes rise without his having to clarify what he really thinks, and his real agenda for this country. Come to think of it, we would be better off with Mr. Ed.

So the first African-American Harvard Law Review is a mascot who can’t speak for himself. A guy who was an Instructor at University of Chicago Law School? It’s legitimate to question his experience on the national and international level. It’s legitimate to want more details from him. However, suggesting he is a token who has to be spoken for is one of the most paternalistic and stupid comments I’ve read even including Joe Biden. This is straight out of the Keyes playbook with the irony being that Keyes’ was the mascot Syverson and Rauschenberger wanted to bring in because he was an articulate black man like Obama.

Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?

But most of all, they put the horse down. How exactly is this a comparison?

Joe Biden called Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to clarify his “clean” comment to the New York Observer, Biden told reporters in a conference call this afternoon. Biden said Obama told him: “You don’t have to explain anything to me. I know exactly what you meant.”

There is some debate about the appropriate use of commas in the sentence, but that is like arguing over whether Biden’s a Huge Idiot or a Really Huge Idiot. You can’t separate with a comma the comparison made between African-Americans in general and Obama specifically. It’s not about whether he’s the first mainstream black candidate-that’s debateable and is akin to how many angels are on that pin over there–it’s the language that is supposedly contrasting to all candidates, but uniquely chosen examples of stereotypes of black candidates.

Is Biden a huge racist? Probably not, but he’s a goof with verbal diarrhea and an uncanny ability to be completely tone deaf. I point out the point he makes above that reads like a Petey Labarbera line thinking something is making him look better, but makes any person paying attention laugh hysterically. Obama probably was being gracious, but it doesn’t matter when you put it that way.

Finally, nice roll out day–calling a colleague and competitor and taking press questions on that all day.

The big question now is how are we going to handle these challenges, this president’s failures.

We can back him into the corner and watch him scramble, or we can rise above that and look for common bonds, interests and values that advance a more noble cause, the interest of the United States, not just the passing interests of political parties.

That we have already seen in abundance.

I don’t take this as a Broderesque appeal to the center for all things wise especially since Madigan points out he thinks much of the President’s agenda is wrong. However, there is a problem that I think many haven’t dealt with in this Presidency that we haven’t seen since Nixon.

I’m all for disagreeing respectfully and some of the time I even try to keep the tone here that way. Well, sometimes. That said, this administration is trying to institute an imperial presidency. It has overreached on Presidential Authority and cast aside the fundamental document to our social contract, the Constitution.

It is the height of incivility to attack our social contract as he has done and he has had willing accomplices from much of his supporters throughout this period who paint even those who disagree civilly as appeasing terrorists or providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

It’s also true that such “they started it “talk doesn’t solve the problem, but the problem isn’t going to be solved as long as George Bush is in office. He has made an art form of sliming his opponents and questioning their patriotism. Bush is incivil and he continues to try manipulate the country through every tool at his disposal–legal or not. Worse, any criticism of him is automatically met with character assassination of the person criticizing him. Bill Clinton’s spin machine was bad, but amateurish compared to the institutions the right has built up to control the debate.

I’ll take it one step further though and I’d suggest that toxicity of our politics is an institutional feature that is bound to happen under certain circumstances. Many of us who grew up watching Bob Michel and others work through compromises across the aisle think of a better time in our politics and bemoan the loss of civility between the parties. I don’t think we or the politicians have changed much, but the electoral consequences have. The Republicans in the late 1980s were largely a permanent minority party and there was little notion that they would become dominant in Congress and so the two parties were able to work together because Republicans needed to to have any influence and Democrats perceived no threat.

Today, it is clear that every major election is up for grabs and so the partisan fighting is especially intense because the stakes are far higher.

Democrats and those more generally center left should try to be civil, but when the stakes and dangers of this Presidency are so great, being shrill is hardly my biggest concern.

Volumes could be written about all that was wrong with what Biden said about Obama, but I believe we’ve just witnessed the shortest presidential run in history.

There’s long been a meme that Obama had never run a tough campaign and couldn’t take punches. What has become apparent to me in watching his team work is that it’s more like some bizarre form of jujitsu where Obama is attacked, but the attack is used against the attacker making Obama look above the fray and people like Joe Biden look like the fools they are.

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

But—and the “but” was clearly inevitable—he doubts whether American voters are going to elect “a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate,” and added: “I don’t recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan or a tactic.”

Clean? WTF?

And, of course, Obama has been giving fairly detailed speeches on the war and a new strategy since at least November of 2005.

Let me remind everyone, Fox News reported a vicious and obviously false claim and have not issued a correction—they put it out there that Obama denied the report. There has been no apology and the best they can do is this:

So maybe there was no written apology, but at least John Moody, vice president for news at Fox, issued this missive to staff in his daily editorial note on Jan. 23: “For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC. The urgent queue is our way of communicating information that is air-worthy. Please adhere to this.”

It’s time for a blogger ethics panel. Seriously, the WaPo is saying that at least….

I’ve screwed up on one particular story that was false and particularly damaging had it been true…I apologized and corrected it. Fox News apparently doesn’t have the high standards of even ArchPundit.